Image and Object in Instructional Texts for Women in Early Modern Japan

This paper will examine the role of illustration in instructional texts for women published in Japan between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. These texts, which grew significantly in number and popularity in the early modern period (defined as the years c. 1590-1868), were aimed at literate commoner and lower-ranking samurai families who aspired to impart to their daughters not only moral teachings, literary skills, and knowledge necessary for managing a family and household, but also rules governing proper etiquette and deportment. Instructional texts, published and circulated in woodblock-print form, were almost always copiously if not lavishly illustrated. Although the texts themselves focus in great detail on the minutiae of proper behavior and discrete actions for women in various contexts, the monochrome images accompanying the text seldom depicted the human form, or human actions. Rather, the images tend to depict material objects used by women—often in a highly formalized and ritualistic manner—in a given setting. My paper will argue that the function of the material object in these illustrations was to formalize and transmit gendered ideals of ritualistic behavior. The emphasis on women’s behavior was not unprecedented or unusual, but it was significant in that it came at a time when behavior began to rival more internalized qualities such as morality and virtue in defining women’s proper roles in and contributions to the social and political order. At the same time, the tendency to depict material objects reflects the growth of the market economy and commodification, forces which also transformed ideals of women’s productive (and reproductive) roles in important ways.